The Olivia Tremor Control
The Olivia Tremor Control is an indie rock band from Athens, Georgia that was part of the legendary Elephant 6 Recording Co. Inspired by surrealism, psychedelic pop music, and musique concrète, the group released two extraordinary studio albums in the 1990s: Music From the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle (1996) and Black Foliage: Animation Music Vol. 1 (1999). The group broke up in 2000 due to tensions between members Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, but the band would later reform in 2005. In 2012, Doss passed away while Olivia Tremor Control was in the process of making their third album. 12 years later, Hart passed away on the same day that the group released two newly recorded singles, “Garden of Light” and “The Same Place.” In the years since, OTC member Derek Almstead, mixing engineer Jason NeSmith, and Elephant 6 member Ron Kwasman set out to bring it to completion while working alongside original members of the band. Culled from material recorded in the late 1990s to 2025, the group’s final album—The Same Place (2026)—is slated for release on October 23rd. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Almstead and NeSmith on August 18th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss memories of Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, the final directives that Hart gave to complete the album, and the specific qualities that make The Olivia Tremor Control who they are.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I wanted to start by asking about your first interactions with The Olivia Tremor Control. Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart are no longer with us, of course, and I’m also curious about what your relationships with them were like.
Jason NeSmith: I was living in Atlanta when I first heard about Olivia Tremor Control and E6. It was through a mutual friend of Bryan Poole. We joined the same band and he gave me a cassette of the first of Montreal record [Cherry Peel (1997)] and the second Elf Power record [When the Red King Comes (1997)]. Even though they were automatically some of my new favorite bands, it was easy to identify that what they were inspired by was what I was inspired by—I immediately felt a kinship.
Derek Almstead: I saw them live at the Atomic Music Hall in Athens in the early winter of ’96, so like January or February. Before I met Kevin [Barnes] and BP and Andrew [Rieger], I had some friends who said I’d love those guys. I think BP was playing keyboards at the time.
Jason NeSmith: You must have seen them on the same little tour I saw them. They probably played the next night or the previous night—they played The Point with BP on keys.
Derek Almstead: That year is when of Montreal got started and, by the end of it, I’d met everybody. It was small-town party vibes. We already had potlucks by then.
Jason NeSmith: At the time, I talked with Bill and Will about tape collage stuff, but I didn’t really get to know them until [my wife] Kay [Stanton] and I moved to Athens and the band broke up. I got to be friends with Bill and knew Will on the periphery. I only really got to know Will about three years ago.
Derek Almstead: I think I started conversations with Will before I did with Bill. Bill was a little more guarded, maybe, but after a year we were neighbors and hung out and recorded music all the time.
Jason NeSmith: Derek, do you remember the show where we met? I think it was a Ladybug Transistor, Marshmallow Coast, and Casper & The Cookies show.
Derek Almstead: Really? Was that the first time? My first real memory of meeting you was when you were coming to work on the Elf Power record.
Jason NeSmith: I remember I said, “Man, I wanna move to Athens” and you said, “You should stay in Atlanta and do cool stuff here.”
Jason, you mentioned talking about tape collage at that early show. Do you remember anything about the conversation?
Jason NeSmith: I was trying to gloss over that (laughter). I’ll apologize for being a fan of Zappa’s instrumental and collage music, but I was really into Uncle Meat (1969). Some stuff on Dusk at Cubist Castle (1996) reminded me of that era. I asked Bill and he said, “That sounds more like a Will question—Hey Will! Do you like Zappa?” And Will screamed, “Yeah! Lumpy Gravy!” (laughter). And in fact, Will and Derek and everyone talked a lot about “conceptual continuity.”
Derek, you and Will were in Circulatory System. Do you mind talking about how you got in the group and what your experiences were like in that band?
Derek Almstead: I got Will’s partner-at-the-time a job at the sub shop I worked at, so I would see them more often naturally than I would at parties and shows. Bill and I started doing some recordings together for what became Sunshine Fix. There was a period after they had finished the last tour for Black Foliage: Animation Music Vol. 1 (1999) where they wanted me to join the band as a bass player, and that was so John [Fernandes] could be full time on the violin and clarinet. They felt they had the financial bandwidth to add another person.
This was also around the time when there were schisms in the band. So it fell apart, I was busy with other projects, and I was still working with Bill a little bit in Sunshine Fix, and then within a year I was in Circulatory System as a drummer. There was a period when there wasn’t a lot of back and forth between those two entities. It only lasted like three years, but it felt like a big deal at the time. It’s kind of a grey memory, but the projects are there—that’s the easiest way to remember things. I really enjoyed being in five bands at a time; I liked being busy and touring and not working a coffeeshop job.
As someone who was too young to see Olivia Tremor Control in the ’90s and 2000s, I’m curious if there’s anything about the live shows that informed how you two approached the creation of this final album, The Same Place (2026).
Jason NeSmith: Olivia could be a lot more punk-inspired—they’d get louder and nastier live. That’s something that didn’t make it on the album. I’d never call them a jam band because they never really jammed, but there was this improvisatory nature to what they did that got brought into The Same Place. We talked about [Grateful Dead’s] Anthem of the Sun (1968) to think about how to mix live and studio recordings in a single composition. There’s more of a live feel on some sections of the record than before.
Derek Almstead: We were also pretty funny, and I don’t think that comes off on the records. There was a lot of banter and silliness. For a good portion there were dada plays and songs that would be done between songs. In Athens there was a chicken-processing plant, and when you drove by you’d always see a sign on the marquee that said “Deboners Needed, $10/Hour” and one of the sketches was about The Debonair Deboner. “Tux and tails are covered in blood. The Debonair Deboner. He’s standing ankle-deep in a chicken-fecal flood. The Debonair Deboner.” I think there was more to it but that’s all I can remember (laughter). Just some dumb, silly, dada humor that I don’t think comes across on the record.
Right, I know both Will and Bill were really into surrealism, so it’s nice to know that aspect was played out live.
Jason NeSmith: When Derek left of Montreal and I joined it, we were adopting some of these mannerisms that spread between various E6 bands. We would pull up to the New Jersey turnpike at the toll and and say “friendly Dracula diapers.”
Derek Almstead: Everyone did the “friendly Dracula diapers” prank. I think that’s a Will Westbrook-ism, if I’m not mistaken.
Jason NeSmith: It’s never been explained to me because I assumed the explanation was the thing itself.
Can you give me a little rundown of The Same Place, its existence, how much of it was around when Bill passed, and how you two and Ron Kwasman came together to finish the album after Will died?
Derek Almstead: In the two years before Bill passed away in 2012, we were working really hard on the record, though in fits and starts because we’d go on tour. Everything that ended up on the record was already in process at the time minus two or three songs, including “Seen It All” and “Universe Café.” What happened is that we recorded at my house a lot and used a hard drive that had the whole project on it. Bill took it home that weekend to work on some vocals, and through elements of miscommunication and grief and time, we just never got the hard drive back. We didn’t really realize how much was on that hard drive. We were working on the record, adding things day to day, but we weren’t cataloguing everything or listening back. Will and Bill were also meeting at Bill’s house, and Bill was doing stuff independently like adding vocals. Jason initiated getting that hard drive back after the documentary [The Elephant 6 Recording Co. (2022)] came out.
Jason NeSmith: I heard that the documentary was being made, and this was after Bill had passed. I got a call from Robert [Schneider] saying, “We wanna bring the other members of Olivia to your home studio to finish up two songs while the cameras roll.” That was when I realized that I had a piano track on one of those songs, “Garden of Light.” This was a song that Bill was working on before the band got together. We worked on that and “The Same Place” for two and a half days.
There was no follow-up, and I didn’t feel comfortable being the one to get the ball rolling again until I saw the documentary. I realized that I was the last guy with the record in his hands, and I didn’t want to be the guy who never finished it. I contacted Will and we went to see Bill’s widow, Amy [Hairston]. We brought her a bottle of wine, it smashed all over the floor, and we had a hell of a time cleaning up all the broken glass—it was a bit of a scene (laughter). We got permission, I brought my computer over, and then I copied all the audio from Bill’s drive. It actually booted up, and it very well could not have and we would’ve been left with very little. For the next few months, I was just finding things that Bill and Will and the band had recorded that were mostly forgotten about. These weren’t rough mixes, either; they were just waiting for somebody.
How long ago were these songs recorded?
Derek Almstead: It’s hard to tell because there are parts of “Path of the Parallels”—Side C—that are probably from the late ’90s. They were Will’s. He had a lot of concept songs, and he brought “Path of the Parallels” into Circulatory System. We worked on that throughout my run in that band. Then there are four songs we started together in Circulatory System in 2002: “Begin Now!,” “The Spinning Continuous,” “Impressions Through the Ring,” and “Meeting Ourselves.” There are a couple Bill songs we worked on—“Timewaster” and “Garden of Light”—around 2007 and 2008. And then in late 2010-ish, Olivia had a meeting with the six of us. We had a stack of CDs and we submitted what we thought would work for this next record. We had a big meeting and separated things into piles. From that alone, we already had most of the stuff for this record.
As I remember it, The Same Place became a concept the minute that Bill brought in his answer song, “The Same Old Place.” “The Same Place,” which was Will’s version, existed in the world of Circulatory System. It was something that we liked a lot. It could’ve gone on Signal Morning (2009), but it didn’t fit into the sequence at the time.
Jason NeSmith: Pete [Erchick] wrote multiple songs with that lyric, so it was definitely something y’all were doing.
Derek Almstead: I wouldn’t be surprised if there were tons of other pathways that could’ve been taken, too.
Jason NeSmith: It is spooky as fuck because it’s already really obvious what the concept was based on Will’s song.
Derek Almstead: In the context of us putting this record together, it loomed very large. It was the thread that put everything together. Who knows what it would’ve been like if Bill hadn’t passed away.
Jason NeSmith: “The Same Place” could’ve meant something different, yeah. When we started working in 2023, the first thing we tried to do was identity what Bill had interacted with, what songs that went through the Bill filter.
What did you find?
Jason NeSmith: All of the things that were Circulatory System in origin, Bill had done something with them. Almost everything on the record except for “Meeting Ourselves” and “Seen It All” are things that Bill had something to do with.
Derek Almstead: And that stems from that original meeting. It was probably the easiest opening for Bill to listen to the song “Now Begin” and ask, “What can I do?” He’d add a harmony. He did that on a bunch of songs. He’d do an overdub or add bells or keyboards or other guitars. That’s what brought it into that world. The thing is, Circulatory System is Olivia Tremor Control plus Heather McIntosh minus Bill and Eric [Harris]. It doesn’t take too much to make the songs OTC—just get those guys to add something.
Jason NeSmith: There were other songs that Bill had already started during the hiatus, and these were with other musicians who weren’t part of the OTC world at all. But for those tracks, with a little color from Will, we brought them back in. The horn players [Marc Gilley, Jeff Crouch, Chris Costigan] on the song “Halfway Down” are from this band called The Heap.
Derek Almstead: The drummer for that band [Ian Werden] plays drums on that track, too.
Jason NeSmith: I don’t even know if he knows he’s on the record (laughter).
What do you guys think makes an OTC song an OTC song? Everyone of course compares them to 1960s psychedelic pop and rock music, and there’s this interest in musique concrète too. I remember reading an interview where they talk about their works as sonic pieces that come around to be a sculptured pop song.
Derek Almstead: The thing that makes it OTC is Will simply contributing a vocal line or crazy guitar part or noise part to a Bill song. Or having John add something to it. In a basic “flavor” way, it’s pretty easy to do. But in a larger conceptual way, to define what an Olivia song is… it’s hard to say beyond it being a shared combination of aesthetic principles. It’s a gut feeling. When I was talking about that band meeting where we were separating things into piles, it wasn’t a very complicated or difficult conversation. We’d listen to a piece and go, “Yeah, OTC. No, that’s some other thing.” It’s just the people that make it the thing.
Jason NeSmith: I often felt there was a maximalist thing going on. That’s true of Circulatory System too, so it’s not enough to say that, but instead of correcting a vocal—one that was embedded into something that was already 16 tracks and mixed to stereo—you didn’t remove it. You layered more vocals until you smoothed it out. In general, the songs get so big that they almost fall apart, but they never do. And if they do, it’s in a beautiful way. This could describe Circulatory System, but you’ve got Bill’s pop song brain here.
Derek Almstead: It comes down to bringing contrasts. Like, here’s this dark pop song, let’s put a pretty harmony on it. Here’s this pretty pop song, it needs an ugly part. That stuff was part of the ideas.
Jason NeSmith: A juxtaposition of different sonic textures is as important to the feeling of an Olivia record as anything else.
So you get the hard drive and transfer the material, but at what point in making this album does Will pass away that then leads to you finishing up the rest of it?
Jason NeSmith: In the middle of 2023, Will and I started working together. We got the hard drive, and job number one was to finish “Garden of Light” and “The Same Place” so we could include them on the documentary soundtrack. It was also a test to see if we could work together because we’d never worked before in any meaningful capacity. Once we did, we started working on the rest of the record while the soundtrack was going to get released. We spent a few months talking about what should be on there. I gave Will access to a lot of various noises that he wanted to chop up and sprinkle all over the record. And then November 29th—Black Friday of 2024—is the day that the soundtrack came out, the singles were released, and Will was gone that morning. It wasn’t long. From that point onward, it was me, Derek, and Ron with input from John, Pete, and Kelly [Hart], making sure that we did it right.
Derek Almstead: Ron and Jason and I were pretty much on a text thread like, “We’re gonna work on this and finish it in a day or two.” This was after Will passed. All three of us really poured a lot of energy almost instantly like, “No more fun and games, we have to finish this for our friends.”
What percentage of the album do you feel was finished at this point? Was all the sequencing already known?
Derek Almstead: No. I came up with the sequencing with slight modification from the group. It’s hard to quantify this exactly, but other than mixing, the amount of overdubs that exist on the record that are post-2012 is not very much. There’s some, but mostly it was about organizing. Will had a punch list that he gave Jason, like, “I want Scott [Spillane] to do the horns on this. I want kids singing on this song.” Jason did all that with people down in Athens. I added a mandolin to one song [“Leaf”] and a tambourine to another [“Advice From the Oceans”] and a couple backing vocals. It was pretty minimal. As far as the actual bulk of recording, it was more than 90% done. Most of the post-work was overdubs and mixing.
Jason NeSmith: The number of overdubs on this record is more than most, so 10% is more than most people’s 10%, but a lot of it was still absolutely done, it just had to be pieced together.
Derek Almstead: We were lucky we had the vocals, that was the #1 thing. Having those vocals was a big deal.
Jason, do you mind speaking to how you mixed the record? Were you listening to the other Olivia albums, were you listening to a bunch of E6 stuff in general, were you listening to their influences? I know they both loved Eno’s pop records as well as Bowie’s Hunky Dory (1971) and The Beatles’ White Album (1968).
Jason NeSmith: There were definitely some sonic spices suggested from conversations that Will and I had. There’s stuff like Ron Geesin’s work with Atom Heart Mother (1970). He was also into Skip Bifferty, this obscure band from the 1960s. His favorite band was The Fall. As far as what the record would sound like, Bill had rough mixes for a lot of things and records kind of sound how they sound. Once you track something, unless you’re really trying to twist it beyond what it is, you’re just trying to honor the intent. Bill would bring his unfinished tracks to Derek or to me, so we felt we had license to be like, “Okay Bill, this is what you did, and you’ve left it to us to make it what you thought it would be.”
What was the intention that you heard in the music?
Jason NeSmith: On a song like “Garden of Light,” there were a lot more tracks recorded than what were in the mix. I could’ve gone back and got tracks that weren’t used, but that’s not what Bill decided. A lot of decisions were like that. You could’ve remixed the songs from the ground up to give them a completely different feeling, but we tried to keep as much Bill and Will in the songs as possible. It wasn’t like a specific style, it was just an instinct.
Derek Almstead: We talked about this a little bit. I don’t know that it would’ve changed anything, but we discussed that we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel in terms of what OTC is. The design was laid out. We just had to make it feel like one of our records, and letting that be the ethos made it simpler, you know? You didn’t have to struggle with your own ego about whether something worked or not. Things just had to fit the mold, and that was true with mix decisions, editing decisions, and sequencing decisions.
Jason NeSmith: The biggest swings we had to take were when things didn’t fit the mold but we knew had to go in. Like, how do you adjust this? “Meeting Ourselves” was like that. Great song, but it didn’t fit yet. It started as a jaunty song that didn’t go through many dynamic shifts, and then we brought it back to 1968, like something released on Regal Zonophone Records. You could feel a bit of speed in the acid.
Derek, can you speak to the sequencing? Were all the “Path of the Parallels” tracks already decided upon as part of that suite? Is the answer yes because they were originally from the 1990s?
Derek Almstead: Sort of. That’s one of those things that was always in flux. There’s probably more sections to the “Path of the Parallels” that exists on CDs, and they would’ve got laid to the side because we were already working at it in this different way. “Path of the Parallels” was something that we were actively working on in the studio in 2012, before our last shows. There’s sections of that where we started mapping it out in a big long file, like “we’ll put a long jam section in here,” and we’d go in, play, and intersplice them. We had this one ambient track that lays space after the first tracks, but then we realized that it came out as a B-side in the past. It was like, “Shit, we have to find something new.” Jason found this other improvised piece that Bill, Will, and John did in Bill’s attic at some point, and that worked out.
Is this “Membraned Wings”?
Jason NeSmith: Yes, and it’s called that because one of Will’s notebook drawings had that phrase in there. It was untitled—the file was literally called “ambient jam.”
Derek Almstead: Fitting “The Same Place” on that side was a late-period adjustment, but having Side 3 be the big, long psych jam was already predestined. We already knew that a long time ago. As far as the rest of the stuff, there’s this couplet of songs, “Advice From the Oceans” and “We Captured a Frame.” Those two go together, and for a long time—back in the day and over the years, when we’d discuss the songs—we always said they should go together and maybe even open the record. That didn’t really work, though.
I knew that “Fossil Faun” should be the last song on the album. It feels like the last song of an Olivia record. It’s dumb and true that “Begin Now!” was a late realization [as the opener]. Having those two, and then figuring out where to put “The Same Old Place” in relation to “The Same Place”… there were these markers, and I just experimented a bunch until it felt right. It actually would’ve been harder to decide on the sequence if Bill and Will had been alive. I don’t mean to sound callous about that, but it’s easier to make decisions.
Jason NeSmith: We were able to say, “I think that’s what they would’ve wanted,” and it’s not like they could’ve said, “No it’s not.”
Derek Almstead: We could only really work with what existed.
Jason NeSmith: A lot of time was spent listening to the “Path of the Parallels” suite and figuring out what elements had already come out on Circulatory records. There were things on Mosaics Within Mosaics (2014), and I wasn’t as familiar with every moment of those records, so I needed to make sure that if we replicated something, it was intentional instead of accidental.
Derek Almstead: It’s tricky because with Will’s work, I was in Circulatory System all this time, but his recording streak broke when he started developing multiple sclerosis. He was the envy of all of our work ethic in the ’90s. He beat himself up doing it, but he would stay up for days and just record and record. There was just tons of material. He was always gung ho and full of ideas, but him sitting at home with a computer or 8-track and cleanly recording a bunch of new overdubs… by 2012, it wasn’t going to happen. You had to have him at your house, or Bill would have him at his house. The idea of mining this stuff, and taking these already amazing ideas and growing them out, we’d already been doing that for 10 years in Circulatory System.
Jason NeSmith: I didn’t know that when I started working with Will, and I didn’t know how far his physical abilities had decayed. He could sing but not like he used to. He’d have awful attacks, and I realized that whatever we were going to accomplish was going to take a long time. Thank God he recorded so much.
Derek Almstead: That was the real paradox: his ideas were still there, but they outpaced what he could do physically. That was challenging sometimes, even in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Of course not every idea ends up being the idea, but he’s a gifted producer—you’d try to honor those things as fast as you could.
Did he express a lot of frustrations with this at the time?
Derek Almstead: Absolutely.
Jason NeSmith: He didn’t around me, but maybe he’d already accepted certain things about his abilities.
Derek Almstead: That’s for sure. But when it was new, it was tough.
Did he keep to himself about his disability, or was that something he confided in the band about early on?
Derek Almstead: In the past, I remember we would work with him and it’d get to a point where we’d do a vocal, we’d get to doubling it, and he’d be crashing out in his energy. He’d say, “I used to be able to just knock this out!” His MS was unfolding. We’d be practicing for Circulatory System shows and he’d be like, “My wrist is really hurting.” We didn’t know at the time so I was just like, “Oh, you just need to practice more.” I just assumed it was something like that, but it was early nerve pain in his wrist.
There were little inklings of it, but they grew worse as time went along. He went through a pretty dark period of dealing with it—he was submerged in depression about it. When Olivia got back together, he was so happy—I’d never seen Will happier. Obviously there was the sadness of losing Bill, but from 2010 on, he was like the happiest Will I’d ever known. He was thrilled about ideas and making things when he could, he was always laughing while watching Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The League.
Jason NeSmith: And 30 Rock.
There are certain tracks on The Same Place that are really short. “Striping the Orchestra” is only four seconds, “Have We Come Around” is only 20 seconds longer, and that one’s interesting because it cuts out abruptly. I’m not really sure if it’s a sketch or if it was meant to actually end there.
Jason NeSmith: That was originally part of the “Path of the Parallels” suite but was cut out. I found it at the end of some ProTools session, and it just haunted me. That’s exactly how long it was.
Derek Almstead: You can think about the record nonlinearly as well as linearly. Anything that comes in on Side D that references Side B or C, it fits the mold of The Black Foliage—this idea of theme and revision. I thought of them as palette cleansers. Without “Have We Come Around,” the song before and after it don’t meld so well, but with it you get this beautiful breath.
Jason NeSmith: It also gives the following track a different hue. It might’ve sounded cheerier otherwise.
Do you mind talking about what the input was like from the other band members?
Derek Almstead: Pete and John and AJ [Griffin] were involved with overdubbing throughout most of the project. Eric is kind of retired so he gave his blessing but didn’t really want to be involved. And sadly, we lost two of his pieces that possibly could’ve been on the record. We never worked on them, but they were part of that original meeting. We might’ve put them in the stack, but we never did anything with them at the time. Though, it wasn’t like we lost these complete songs, we just lost these cool Eric ideas. For “Now Begin,” Pete had that sketched out back in the day with different lyrics, and Will and Bill had taken some of the music from that and did this sped-up, carnivalesque ending. For that song, Jason and Pete basically completed it this past year.
Jason NeSmith: I wrote a lyrical section for some background vocals on the record. “Now Begin” is Pete Erchick’s song and it was originally called “Go By.” He added lyrics to it, and those were the last lead-vocal lyrics that addressed what the album is now. Otherwise, John came over to listen to the record all the way through a couple of times. With Pete, I wasn’t sure how much he was on the record.
Derek Almstead: Pete had done a lot. We were always switching hats in the band, which was fun, but it made it difficult when we were making credits.
Jason NeSmith: This meant that I had Pete over at my house more often, and we knew that “Now Begin” needed finished lyrics and finished vocals too. He got to say what goes and what doesn’t go with his song.
“Now Begin” is the song I’d imagine would end the album because of its lyrics. “Goodbye, bye again.” I do love that it’s in the middle of the album, though.
Jason NeSmith: Those lyrics actually were there on his demo from 2011 or so. That is Pete talking about how relationships change with transformation. He always worked in themes to a small set of lyrics.
Jason, you have contributions to the album beyond the mixing. You’re credited for horns and xylophones and other things, including a “paper rip” on “Last Occupants.” Were these all in the notes that Will gave?
Jason NeSmith: Some of it was notes. For “Path of the Parallels,” the source of the notes that I had to work with… it did start to get frustrating to figure out what needed to be completed for that song. I gave Will a microphone and said, “Just verbalize what you think should happen while the track is playing.” From that I got a lot of actual instructions. Stuff like, “Scott should play here.” He had this idea called the “dream chord,” and he said it should appear in certain places. At one point he physically lifted up his notebook and started ripping pages, and I thought, more of that would be good.
As much as we’ve talked about maximizing the Will and Bill-ness of it all, it feels awkward to say this, and I don’t take this in any super official way, but Will said, “I need you to help me finish my record.” I said, “I’m gonna have to run everything by you.” “No, don’t. You’re in the band now.” So I was given permission to add things, but respectfully. The horns on “Timewaster” were something that Derek and I were working with, and then Derek was like, “Why don’t you arrange some horns?”
Derek Almstead: The horn melody in general was originally all guitars. It felt like the song didn’t fit with all this heavy guitar action, so we messed around with different things. At one point it was a toy piano, and that was to go in the exact opposite direction. Like, how do we make this a completely different color, and then Jason had the idea to get Robbee [Cucchiaro] and Kirk [Pleasant] to do horns on it.
Jason NeSmith: And some double-speed clarinet from John. I think that was the only new John track.
Earlier you mentioned the “dream chord.” What is it, and where does it appear on the album?
Jason NeSmith: It’s not a specific chord so much as an idea.
Derek Almstead: Like a tone cluster.
Jason NeSmith: Yeah. It appears in “We Captured a Frame” and then “A River of White” that’s just a dozen layers of Scott. At the end of “California Demise 4,” Will had been saying for a long time that it needed to have so many layers that it would turn into static and then cut off. The only thing I could think of was “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” Robert Schneider’s big contribution after 2017 were these parameters for reverb. We ran another tone cluster through this reverb, and there are three places on the record where this tone cluster exist.
I got to play the recording—the one of Will giving instructions—for the people who needed to execute them. So after Will was gone, here he is telling Scott, “Scott, play here, don’t play here. Play this melody (makes spurting horn melody).” I didn’t know what that was, and Scott said we should just play exactly the thing he said (laughter).
Is there anything else about the album you think is important to mention?
Jason NeSmith: If anyone’s wondering if there will be another Olivia album, the answer is no. If you’re wondering if there’s a concert that will follow this record, the answer is no.
Derek Almstead: There’s nothing beyond this in terms of an Olivia album. We used all the stuff.
I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you guys, though with a twist. I wanted to ask if each of you could share one thing you love about Will and Bill.
Jason NeSmith: Bill and I not only worked on his stuff, but he worked at my house on my recordings and my friends’ recordings. Our wives were friends too. We’d go out to eat and just talk. What I loved about Bill was his openness to ideas. Not just working with other people on their ideas, but getting input from others. He had strong impulses and instincts, but he was open to whatever somebody wanted to throw at him. He was incredibly friendly to me, and somebody like Will needs an executor, to collect all the CDs off the floor, to organize the ideas and make sure that they’re done. People have taken turns doing that throughout Will’s life, and Bill was maybe the first one.
Derek Almstead: Maybe Robert.
Jason NeSmith: Oh yeah, maybe. I’m sure Bill got a lot of inspiration from being around Will, but he partially subsumed his creative ego to help Will finish his things. For Will, it’s just the dynamo of inspiration that he was. People talk about him having three conversations at once, and it really was like watching a Shakespeare play. You just gotta tune into it, and once you did it was amazing. Such a singular person. And the two of them together—it was like Rodgers and Hammerstein, John and Paul.
Derek Almstead: Will and I were pretty close for a long time. It’s weird because when Will gets going, it’s almost like he has this “randomized idea” thing going, but after a while you’d level up to that frequency. Those were some of the best talks and laughs and idea sessions I’ve ever had. And Bill was a sweet, lovely, fun guy to hang out with. He had lots of great ideas too, but fun and lightness were his main operators. I was thinking of his favorite joke earlier. We were talking about maximalism, and his favorite joke was “Minimalism, it’s the least that you can do.” He would tell that joke a lot (laughter). But it also came out in the recordings.
Olivia Tremor Control’s final album, The Same Place, is out October 23rd via Elephant 6 Recording Co.
Thank you for reading the 239th issue of Tone Glow. Don’t hideaway from all your daydreams.
If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Tone Glow is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Tone Glow will be able to publish issues more frequently.
I suspect Jason's reference to Zappa's Conceptual Continuity is to the idea itself — of all of Zappa's releases being in some way related — not to the bootleg album of the same name specifically.
Incredible interview, thanks so much! Have been waiting for just this level of insight into the new album.